The Machine That Changed the World: Interview with Alan Kay (1990)

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69 points·noblethrasher··6 comments

> my feeling is, is that anything that is larger human scale invokes mechanisms concerned with religion so you have a priesthood with white coats, you know all the paraphernalia were there and some people thought it would take over the world and some people wanted it to take over the world, and some people were afraid it would take over the world, and none of those things happened.

Can things be said any more brilliantly, for all inclusive matters involving humans?

> Kay: Total Recall, you know Total Recall, somebody said, if you like road accidents, you'll love this picture. And the, that kind of stuff, you know, where you have, you know, five people you have to kill every 30 seconds or so is very easy to set up in virtual reality. I'm sure that a large percentage of the population will enjoy it.

Now there's grand theft auto serie and others.

I've been trying for a while to try to download this video... can't seem to grab the raw video file. Anyone have any ideas?

It's slightly tricky. The files are hosted on S3 but have some interesting referer and key restrictions. You can see the webm and mp4 URLs in the source but can't download them naively. But if you open Chrome's console and look at the Network tab you can right-click on something like a css file and choose "Copy as CURL". This produces a commandline spooge that has all the necessary stuff.

Paste that into a text file and replace the css URL with the URL of the video. Then add " > kay.video.mp4" to the end to pipe to a file, and paste it all into a Terminal window. Voila. The file is 577978075 bytes long.

The cleverest tip I've read today

brilliant, this is exactly what I was looking for. Thanks so much!

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